Лорен Хендерсон: The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Erotica

Oh, God, his body.

I remember our first date, if you can call it a date. A walk from the beauty supply store where I worked after school back to my home – with a lengthy sojourn in a deserted alley behind the beauty supply. And I remember our first kiss – moments into our first date. What was I doing out in the rapidly darkening twilight with him? Who was looking out for me? He was.

He pushed me up against a wall and kissed me so ferociously that there are days I swear I can still feel his lips on mine. When I run my tongue over my bottom lip I feel where he bit me. Can you feel a kiss fifteen years later? You bet you can.

His large, warm hands gripped my wrists over my head while his powerful body held mine in place. He pressed against me, and I could tell how hard he was, and I could understand – finally – what all those whispers about sex were about. I hadn’t got it before. Look, I wasn’t an idiot. Just naive. I knew where babies came from. I’d watched enough old movies to understand the steaminess of the looks between hero and heroine. But there’d been no appeal to me in the high-school fumblings at dances. In the background make-out sessions at parties. I’d been an outsider, an alien, gazing in wistfully from a distance and knowing for certain that nothing present was right for me.

With Mark, everything was different.

In that back alley behind the cosmetic store where I was a shop girl, he slid a hand up under my shirt and ran his fingers over my pale-pink satin bra. In a flash, I wished that the bra was made of black lace instead. He touched my breasts firmly, as if he owned them, as if he owned me. He took my clothes off, unbuttoning my jeans himself, pulling my shirt up over my head, exposing me for what I really was.

“A slut,” he said, “You’re my little slut—”

I shivered, but stayed silent. I knew who the sluts were at school. I knew that I wasn’t one.

“Aren’t you? Tell the truth.” His hands were everywhere. His mouth on my neck, his fingers pulling down my panties and parting my lips to see how wet I was.

“Come on, Carla. Tell the truth—”

I Google him. Endlessly. Dangerously. Desperately.

Because he knew me. I was just out, taking that first shy step out into the world… and he knew me.

I understand why I do it. So why the hell do I find it so odd that he Googles me, too? That I get an email, short but not sweet, asking if I’m the one he remembers.

Yeah, I am. Sure, I am. Of course, I am.

I think I am.

Mark waits for me in our spot, leaning against a grey concrete wall, looking almost exactly the same despite a fifteen-year absence. Do I look the same, too? I’m not. Not a teenager any more, not trembling with desire, not – dare I say it? – young.

But I was young. Back then, I was new.

We were inseparable for months, me, a high-school kid, and this twenty-seven-year-old hoodlum. This handsome, so handsome, man with the cold blue eyes out of a Who song and the iron jawline. A man who seemed to know everything about me. What was I doing? What was I thinking? Christ, what am I thinking now, fifteen years later? He’s in his forties, but still effortlessly lean and tough with only the slightest lines around his eyes and the same tall, hard body I remember. I have on jeans and a black sleeveless T-shirt that says, “I break things” on the front, something I dug out of a box filled with memories in the attic. I can pass for twenty-three rather than thirty-three if I have to. My dark hair is long to my shoulders, my glossy bangs in my eyes, as always.

He doesn’t say a word. He just looks at me. I close my eyes tight and remember – the loss of him when he disappeared, the way no boy could replace him after he was gone. I spent years trying to recreate the exact connection that we’d had. I slutted myself out with a variety of losers, all of whom possessed at least one rebellious quality of Mark’s, but none who owned the whole package. Some spanked me. Some fucked me in public places. None made me feel anything other than disillusioned. Ultimately, I gave up hope. Now, even though I am with someone else, I’ve come running at Mark’s call.

What the fuck am I doing here?

“Carla,” he says, hands in my thick hair, lips on mine, and it is suddenly summertime again, and I’m missing him.

“Carla,” he says, and I open my eyes and I look at him, and see him, the man, the danger, the reason I’m who I am today. If I hadn’t met him in high school, who would I have become? Some other girl. Some smart chick. Not a person who would leave a loving relationship in order to track down that fleeting emotion of lust from a decade and a half ago. Not a moron who could still go weak-kneed at the first sight of her long-time crush.

“What do you need, baby?” he asks, and I find myself cradled in his strong arms, as always, my legs shaky, my heart pounding at triple-speed so that I can feel the timpani-throb in my chest and hear the clatter in my ears. “Can you say it, now? Can you tell Daddy what you need?”

My throat grows tight. There’s a man at home, waiting for me. A simple man with a true soul who does not know where I am, but who trusts me to always return nonetheless. Yet suddenly the very concept of trust seems immensely overrated. What’s trust to lust? Which emotion would win every time?

“Carla,” Mark says. Just that word. Just my name, and I am lost all over again, head spinning, heart dying.

“Let’s go.”

He has no power over me. I’m not a kid any more. You can’t impress me with a stolen Harley. You can’t turn me into a puddle with a single kiss. I’m only here on a crazy dare. I’m only here because of Google. I can leave him. I can run. I have a safe home furnished with faux antiques from Pottery Barn and appliances purchased only after careful consideration of the advice of Consumers’ Choice . I have a place to be. Mark doesn’t own me, not any part of me.

“Come on, baby.”

I suppose I’ve hidden it well, the desires that burn in me. I chose normal over interesting. I chose safety over adventure.

“You know you want to.”

Back then, I’d never have been so fucking lame. Back then, I’d always take the risks when offered. Jesus, I invented the risks when there were none available. Slipping out my bedroom window to meet him. Cutting class to ride to his apartment on the back of his pilfered Harley. Letting him handcuff me to his bedframe so that he could do anything he wanted to me. Anything at all.

Can I change? Is it too late?

My hand is trapped in his, held so tightly. The heat between us is palpable. Some people never find that heat. That summertime heat that melts over your body and leaves you breathless. Some people search their whole miserable fucking lives for some semblance of a sizzling kiss, and they die believing that “true love always” is just a bitter myth. But I found that heat as a teenage kid and I knew for real that it existed. Even if I’d never found it again, I’d had it once.

How many places have I looked? How many other dark alleys have I gone down with nameless, faceless men, trying to find that old summertime magic from years ago?

Mark bends to kiss my neck and I remember in a flash, in one of those blinding jolts, that he’d covered me in suntan oil one sultry afternoon. I’d spent the whole day at the beach, the first truly hot spring day, and he’d come to my house afterwards and dumped out my red-striped canvas tote bag onto my floor and found that bottle of oil. My group of friends had no fear of wrinkles yet, no worry about sun damage, not like the ladies in my circle now, the ones who Google StriVectin with the passion that I’ve Googled this man. We used the oil back then, for “the San Tropez tan”. Mark coated his strong hands while he told me to strip, and I’d watched his hands for a moment, dripping with the oil, knowing what he was going to do.